Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Study

Davinci the Dualist: The Mind-Body Divide in Large Language Models and in Human Learners

A large literature suggests that people are intuitive Dualists-they consider the mind ethereal, distinct from the body. Furthermore, Dualism emerges, in part, via learning (e.g., Barlev & Shtulman, 2021). Human learners, however, are also endowed with innate systems of core knowledge, and recent results suggest that core knowledge begets Dualism (Berent, 2023a; Berent et al., 2022). The resulting question, then, is whether the acquisition of Dualism requires core knowledge, or whether Dualism is learnable from experience alone, via domain-general mechanism. Since human learners are equipped with both systems, the evidence from humans cannot decide this question. Accordingly, here, we probe for a mind-body divide in Davinci-a large language model (LLM) that is devoid of core knowledge. We show that Davinci still leans towards Dualism, and that this bias increases systematically with the learner's inductive potential. Thus, davinci (which forms part of the GPT-3 suite) exhibits mild Dualist tendencies, whereas its descendent, text-davinci-003 (a GPT-3.5 model), shows a stronger bias. It selectively considers thoughts (epistemic states) as disembodied-as unlikely to show up in the body (in the brain). Unlike humans, GPT 3.5 categorically rejected the persistence of the psyche after death. Still, when probed about life, GPT 3.5 showed robust Dualist tendencies. These results demonstrate that the mind-body divide is partly learnable from experience. While results from LLMs cannot fully determine how humans acquire Dualism, they do place a higher burden of proof on nativist theories that trace Dualism to innate core cognition (Berent, 2023a; Berent et al., 2022).

How to Tell a Dualist?

People exhibit conflicting intuitions concerning the mind/body links. Here, I explore a novel explanation for these inconsistencies: Dualism is a violable constraint that interacts with Essentialism. Two experiments probe these interactions. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated the emergence of psychological traits in either a replica of one's body, or in the afterlife-after the body's demise. In line with Dualism, epistemic (i.e., disembodied) traits (e.g., knowing the contrast between good/bad) were considered more likely to emerge (relative to sensorimotor/affective traits) only in the afterlife. However, so were innate traits (in line with Essentialism). To further gauge Essentialism, Experiment 2 presented the same traits to innateness judgments. Here, sensorimotor/affective (i.e., embodied) traits were considered more likely to be innate, suggesting that innateness intuitions are informed by embodiment. Moreover, innateness judgments (in Experiment 2) and embodiment intuitions (in Experiment 1) correlated. These results suggest that Dualism tacitly constrains reasoning about one's innate origins and its persistence after death. But since Dualism is "soft" and interacts with Essentialism, supernatural intuitions are chimeric, not purely ethereal.